What makes a decision difficult? Usually, the answer is that the decision requires us to spend scarce resources. A “resource” is any asset that can be leveraged to achieve business objectives: time, money, staff, trucks, computer cores, and research effort can all be viewed as resources. When you decide to spend your resource on something (e.g., investing into a research project, or accepting a delivery job), there is less of the resource that can be spent on something else. You thus have to think carefully about the tradeoffs involved in allocating resources to one objective as opposed to another.
This class develops a quantitative framework for studying resource allocation problems. Resource allocation problems arise in many industries and areas such as transportation, electronics, advertising, finance, and health care. The specifics of each problem are very different. Nonetheless, all resource allocation problems, in all of these areas, have common elements that behave in exactly the same way. We will develop an abstract modeling language that emphasizes these common elements, so that you will be able to write down any resource allocation problem on paper and then apply standard tools (such as Microsoft Excel) to obtain solutions.